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In Other Words: Defunctuation

It’s not just words that go extinct, sometimes
the symbols before or after them fall off the perch. Take the interrobang – not
the sexual torture it sounds like but a handy combination of the exclamation
mark and the question mark or ‽. It was invented in 1962 to handle both alarming and
questioning sentences, but despite getting a run on typewriters in the 1970s
never really took off. It became defunctuation.

The interrobang joins typographical
oddities at the foggy end of the keyboard such as irony mark ؟ (a backward
question mark invented in France
and never seen in the USA)
and asterism ⁂ (a triangle of three asterisks used to signal the end of a sub-chapter).
Still, there is the hope of refunctuation as symbols get resurrected like the @
sign – once exclusively used by accountants for “at the rate of” before email
jumpstarted its comeback.